Asphalt Modernism on the Streets of Toronto, 1890–1900

Phillip Gordon Mackintosh

Abstract

In the 1890s, Toronto's city engineers participated in a modernizing impulse that included the widespread use of asphalt pavement. The engineers' recommendation of asphalt for Toronto's particular traffic circumstance demonstrates an ideological commitment to the belief that asphalt promoted aesthetics and hygiene in the physical and human space of the city, in spite of the pavement's ruinous effects on certain streets. Asphalt facilitated the appearance in the streets of fashionable cyclists, in a city suffering the deleterious effects of industrialism. In short, asphalt symbolized modernism in the streets. "As a man is judged by his linen, a city is judged by its streets." Charles Mulford Robinson, 1899